169 research outputs found
Simply Exponential Approximation of the Permanent of Positive Semidefinite Matrices
We design a deterministic polynomial time approximation algorithm for
the permanent of positive semidefinite matrices where . We write a natural convex relaxation and show that its optimum solution
gives a approximation of the permanent. We further show that this factor
is asymptotically tight by constructing a family of positive semidefinite
matrices
On the Spread of Viruses on the Internet
We analyze the contact process on random graphs generated according to the preferential attachment scheme as a model for the spread of viruses in the Internet. We show that any virus with a positive rate of spread from a node to its neighbors has a non-vanishing chance of becoming epidemic. Quantitatively, we discover an interesting dichotomy: for it virus with effective spread rate λ, if the infection starts at a typical vertex, then it develops into an epidemic with probability λ^Θ ((log (1/ λ)/log log (1/ λ))), but on average the epidemic probability is λ^(Θ (1))
Approximating the Largest Root and Applications to Interlacing Families
We study the problem of approximating the largest root of a real-rooted
polynomial of degree using its top coefficients and give nearly
matching upper and lower bounds. We present algorithms with running time
polynomial in that use the top coefficients to approximate the maximum
root within a factor of and when and respectively. We also prove corresponding
information-theoretic lower bounds of and
, and show strong lower
bounds for noisy version of the problem in which one is given access to
approximate coefficients.
This problem has applications in the context of the method of interlacing
families of polynomials, which was used for proving the existence of Ramanujan
graphs of all degrees, the solution of the Kadison-Singer problem, and bounding
the integrality gap of the asymmetric traveling salesman problem. All of these
involve computing the maximum root of certain real-rooted polynomials for which
the top few coefficients are accessible in subexponential time. Our results
yield an algorithm with the running time of for all
of them
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